Climate Change Makes Human Sleep Time Decrease, In 2099 People Only Sleep 10 Minutes
JAKARTA - Climate change is predicted to trigger forest fires and melt polar glaciers. But a new study claims it will also deprive us of a comfortable night's rest.
Researchers have studied global weather data and information from sleep trackers that people use to predict future effects on our sleep.
By 2099, temperatures will reduce between 50 and 58 hours of sleep per person per year, to just under 10 minutes per night.
According to research, the effect of temperature on sleep deprivation will be much greater for residents of low-income countries, such as India, as well as for adults and older women.
Overall, adults would fall asleep later, wake up earlier, and sleep less during future hot nights, which would put them at risk of 'multiple adverse physical and mental outcomes'.
Higher global temperatures will eat away at our total sleep because the core body temperature needs to drop to fall asleep. However, this becomes more difficult to achieve as the temperature around us gets hotter.
"Our bodies are highly adapted to maintain a stable core body temperature, something on which our lives depend," said study author Kelton Minor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
"But every night they do something extraordinary without most of us knowing it - they release heat from our core into the environment by dilating our blood vessels and increasing blood flow to our hands and feet," Minor said, as quoted by the Daily Mirror. '
"In order for our bodies to transfer heat from these extremities, the surrounding environment must be cooler than ours," says Minor. In the tropics, many people use air conditioners or air conditioners to achieve a good night's sleep.
For the study, the research team used anonymous global sleep data collected from sleep tracking bracelets that detect sleep and wake patterns.
The data includes 7 million sleep records from more than 47,000 adults in 68 countries spanning all continents except Antarctica, including the UK, US, Australia, France, India, Mexico and Canada.
This was then compared to measurements of global weather over time, which allowed the team to find patterns between the two factors and make predictions for the future.
The study found that on very warm nights hotter than 86°F (30°C), sleep decreased by more than 14 minutes on average. The odds of getting less than seven hours of sleep also increased as the temperature rose.
Under the normal routine of living, people seem much better at adapting to colder outside temperatures than to hotter conditions.
"Across different seasons, demographics, and climatic contexts, warmer outside temperatures consistently erode sleep, with the amount of sleep deprivation increasing as temperatures get warmer," Minor said.
One important observation is that people in developing countries appear to be more affected by these changes. However, the limitation of this study is that it does not take into account artificial cooling technologies such as air conditioning.
It is possible that the greater prevalence of AC in developed countries played a role in these results. Also, there is a paucity of sleep tracking data from Africa, which experiences particularly severe heat compared to other parts of the world.
According to experts, future research should consider more vulnerable populations, particularly those living in the hottest and historically poorest regions of the world.
Recent self-reported data from the US show that subjective sleep quality declines during periods of hot weather. But how temperature fluctuations might affect changes in objective sleep outcomes in people living in different global climates remains unclear.
"In this study, we provide the first planetary-scale evidence that warmer-than-average temperatures are eroding human sleep," said Minor.
"We show that this erosion occurs primarily by delaying when people fall asleep and by advancing when they wake up in hot weather," Minor added, as in the study published in the journal One Earth.